The prioritization of durable growth over growth at all costs has become the focus of every SaaS modeled business.
Customer success is the solution for those seeking to break through the constraints caused by the downward pressure of the economy. With so many leaders prioritizing efficiency, it wasn’t surprising that our recent Catapult webinar covered how Gainsight customer, NAVEX, effectively scaled its customer success program through digital-led segmentation.
The discussion with Angie DeLaRosa was full of great ideas and insights that worked for NAVEX and can easily be put into practice in your customer success program and tech stack. In the following interview, DeLaRosa shares some of the results from recent campaigns, including:
- +50% percent open rate and +40% click-through-rate on humanized digital touchpoints
- 30% response rate (i.e. engagement) on critical customer communications
- Increased traffic to customer education content
- 1,900% increase in adoption in under-utilized services
- 10% improvement in churn rate
Did those metrics get your attention? Read on to learn how they did it.
For scaling companies who historically had white glove delivery to all of their customers, what is it like to transition from 1:1 CSM help to welcoming a certain segment of customers to a digital-led model?
When you have fewer than 100 customers it’s definitely easier to have a 1:1 and high-touch strategy. With over 13,000 customers, we wanted to embrace digital to ensure each and every customer received the value and support they need to be successful. The guiding philosophy of the digital touch program is that customers get ‘real people when they need them, but self-service when they want it.
Following that mantra, we used many of the same templates that exist for our high-touch, 1:1 customer success activities. We adjusted them to direct their engagement to self-service resources, but the tone and experience still felt very human. As a result, most of our customers aren’t even aware they are in a digital segment, it still feels like a 1:1 interaction.
You structured your digital CS model off of one data point! Tell us about that.
It’s easy to overwhelm yourself with data and oftentimes, when people think about scaling, they think they need to scale their data inputs in order to create the right approach. For NAVEX, we looked at the implementation and honed in on one data point which was the delivery of the customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey as implementation wrapped up. We keyed in on that date and launched our entire digital playbook from the timing of that survey.
Our reasoning was, it is a logged activity that is consistent across the entire customer base, which then gave us the same effective starting point for everyone.
How do you define the right “moments of truth” to digitize?
Defining the moments to digitize came out of our cross-collaboration with other departments and then with actual customers. We held a cross-functional workshop that reviewed and plotted out the first 30-60-90-day experience for customers and considered all the things they would need from us in that time period. We also spoke with customers and asked what they were doing, and what they felt other customers should be doing with our product.
We built our library of digital templates from these learnings and used Gainsight features– including Journey Orchestrator– to configure the exact experience we wanted our customers to have.
What do you do when there are indicators that a customer is moving off the ideal path?
This is an area that we supplement with more data and attention. When we identify a risk area, we monitor it at scale. For example, a failure to launch is a risk factor we hone in on. Our welcome series helps to remedy that. We’re planning updates to our health score to better automate this type of risk trigger so that it can also become a churn predictor for us. Through it all, we keep focused on creating ways to intervene with the right information at the right time to proactively mitigate issues.
How do you see your current strategy evolving? What are you working on currently to enhance your digital engagement with NAVEX customers?
Beyond adding breadth and depth of touchpoints based on identified risk factors, we continue to focus on what our customers are interested in. They are always interested in the planning phases of strategy in our market. We’ve got a program developing that is similar in concept to Gainsight’s O2 framework with a self-assessment that customers can take to better understand the state of their risk and compliance programs, and then map that back to the value they can achieve in our product. As we continuously improve the quantification of individual customer responses, we can further tailor the content delivered digitally for further enablement, delivered at the right time.
What advice would you give CS leaders just starting to build out their own digital strategy?
Start small. We launched our digital segment from one data point and mirrored the 1:1 experience and templates we were already successfully using. Be sure to coordinate between CS and marketing teams as to not inundate people with email or other digital touchpoints. Set up your MVP success criteria and KPIs. For NAVEX that was email open and click rates. We also use NPS as a leading indicator metric and retention rates as our key lagging outcome.
